2006: poetry, hate crimes in the news, and a loss still keenly felt today
It’s an entry from 2006 that, every year since, gets an impressive flurry of hits around GCSE exam time. Thankfully, I know the information I posted in Carol Ann Duffy: A Beginner’s Guide, all about one of Britain’s most successful poets, is correct—but really, despite GCSE results around the country usually being quite good, it concerns me that kids are still using the Internet for last-minute revision despite all the warnings that, when it comes to study, books should be used and not websites that haven’t been given a stamp of educational authority. I mean, I know the stuff I wrote isn’t fiction, but I agree with the advice. Sites like Wikipedia are most often used, despite anyone being able to contribute to them.
tags: 2006, archives, bereavement, Carol Ann Duffy, cats, China, David Morley, Dolly, Iran, poetry, retrospective, UN, US, Zimbabwe2004: Maggie’s Moon
2004 was a difficult year, one that I would characterise as involving a dramatic life change. I started blogging the same month I was diagnosed with Mal de Debarquement Syndrome (MdDS), and for the first year of living with the disability my balance was at its worst. It’s nearly always the same for MdDS sufferers, as if the brain struggles to cope with whatever’s gone wrong, and doesn’t do a particularly good job of it. After those 12 months or so, compensatory mechanisms seem to kick in and you find yourself better able to deal with, or accommodating, the weird sensory effects that MdDS puts upon you. I couldn’t spend much time in front of a computer, perhaps fifteen minutes a day, tops, but you’d never tell from the number of poems I published in the first five months, the tail end of 2004, back when the blog was hosted on Blogger.
tags: archives, blogging, creative writing, past, poems, retrospective, stories
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